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Science

Scientists Create Record-Breaking Laser With Mind Blowing Power (vice.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the record-breaking-intensity dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For the Korean research team led by senior author Chang-hee Nam, a plasma physicist and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology, their breakthrough in laser science may be a physically small feat (striking an area the size of a micron) but will have a huge impact on how we study not only cosmic phenomena from the beginning of time but how we treat cancer as well. After ten years of toiling, the team has demonstrated in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Optica the development of a laser with record-breaking intensity over 10^23 watts per square centimeter. Nam told Motherboard in an email that you can compare the intensity of this laser beam to the combined power of all of the sunlight across the entire planet, but pressed together into roughly the size of a speck of dust or a single red blood cell. This whole burst of power happens in just fractions of a second. "The laser intensity of 10 W/cm is comparable to the light intensity obtainable by focusing all the sunlight reaching Earth to a spot of 10 microns," explained Nam.

To achieve this effect, Nam and colleagues at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS) lab constructed a kind of obstacle course for the laser beam to pass through to amplify, reflect, and control the motion of the photons comprising it. Because light behaves as both a particle (e.g. individual photons) as well as a wave, controlling the wavefront of this laser (similar to the front of an ocean wave) was crucial to make sure the team could actually focus its power. Nam explains that the technology to make this kind of precise control possible has been years in the making. Nam said that the ultrahigh power laser design played a role in this discovery by helping remove beam distortions while the deformable mirrors made it possible to have "extremely tight focusing without any aberrations." Beyond being a scientific breakthrough, Nam said that this high-intensity laser will open doors to explore some of the universe's most fundamental questions that had previously only been explored by theoreticians. Nam also said that these lasers have a more terrestrial purpose as well in the form of cancer treatment technology.
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Scientists Create Record-Breaking Laser With Mind Blowing Power More

Scientists Create Record-Breaking Laser With Mind Blowing Power

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  • I'm no scientist but 10^23 watts per square centimeter certainly looks like it could blow your mind

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Revek ( 133289 )
      How much more power would be required to spark the vacuum? I seem to recall someone a few years ago created a beam with enough power that it created an electron and the beam collapsed. I can't find anything on it right now. I'm am not a physicist so I could be remembering it all wrong.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Viol8 ( 599362 )

        Compare to the power concentrated at the core of a supernova or a neutron star collision the jets created by black holes we're still toddlers playing in the sandpit so I wouldn't start worrying just yet.

        • A super nova event ASSASN-15lh radiated 2.2 x 10^38 joules of energy per second (watts). Now that's over the large area of a supernova and not packed into a spec of dust. But a 10^15 factor between them is pretty significant. But as a size comparison between the area of the surface of our Sun and a square centimeter, the Sun is 6 x 10^18 m^2 or 6x10^22 cm^2. Is that right, are we in the ballpark in terms of energy density.

      • That is a strange thought.
        I'm not good enough at physics to understand how that is possible, but I know enough to know it's mind-bending

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Briareos ( 21163 )

      /!\ Do not look into laser with remaining brain! /!\

  • The usual math games. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @08:06AM (#61358324)

    If I concentrate a toddler's strength to a needle point, he can pierce your chest and heart "like a bullet" too.

    • No, 10^23 watts is 10^23 watts, spread over small area, large area doesn't change that. Of course the trick to get such power levels is to take rather more limited energy available and release it all in an extremely short pulse.

      • Re:The usual math games. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @08:59AM (#61358530) Homepage

        But this paper discusses 10^23 W/cm2, which is different than 10^23 W. Especially when they mention that their target area was one micron across (eight orders of magnitude smaller than 1 square centimeter), and their pulse duration was roughly 20 femtoseconds (1 fs being 10^-15 s). So their pulse used something like 20 joules of energy, about 5 "small" calories worth (0.005 food calories).

        • Re:The usual math games. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Entrope ( 68843 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @09:35AM (#61358688) Homepage

          And just to be clear, this work is impressive. During their ~20 fs pulse, light could travel just under 6 microns. They managed to generate such a short pulse, focus it on one tiny spot, measure that pretty accurately, and then repeated that 80 times. Yes, part of the count is to improve their confidence intervals, but their apparatus is pretty cool. The write-up of it is fairly accessible, and near the front of the paper. It's not a lot of energy, but the amazingly short time and small area mean both power and intensity are huge.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ed_1024 ( 744566 )

          I am not a particle physicist but this must be nearer to the famed Kugelblitz than anything we have done so far. Does anyone know how many orders of magnitude away?

      • Intensity Matters (Score:4, Informative)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @09:02AM (#61358550) Journal

        No, 10^23 watts is 10^23 watts, spread over small area, large area doesn't change that.

        Yes, it does that's why the "per unit area" part of the units is important. Sunlight is just over 1,000 W/m^2, this is 10^19 W/m^2. Sunlight feels nice and warm on your skin, this laser will strip air molecules of electrons and create plasma and would burn a hole in you. What matters for waves is the intensity, the total power just determines over how large an area you can maintain that intensity..

        • Re:Intensity Matters (Score:5, Interesting)

          by pz ( 113803 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @09:37AM (#61358698) Journal

          I seem to recall that the effects of photon intensities like this are really unusual. Perhaps that's why the lab is called the Center for Relativistic Laser Science. Indeed, from the second paragraph of their article:

          For the exploration of strong field quantum electrodynamics (SFQED), ultrahigh-power lasers with intensity exceeding 10^23W/cm2 are strongly desired [26,27]. At this intensity level, SFQED phenomena will become accessible in the strongly nonlinear regime; ultra-intense gamma rays can be emitted via the nonlinear Compton scattering (NCS) and electron–positron pairs can be created via the nonlinear Breit–Wheeler process [28–31]. In addition, proton acceleration can be dominated by radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) [32,33]. To realize laser intensity exceeding 10^23W/cm2, we have developed a series of laser technologies necessary to obtain the highest laser intensity attainable and applied them to the CoReLS 4-PW laser.

          In other words, the electromagnetic fields are strong enough at these intensities that they rip apart the fabric of space and start spewing electron-positron pairs, among other things. They're intense enough that strong force effects can be seen. Yeah, that's a pretty big deal. To the armchair scientists are saying the achievement is ho-hum, well, I'd like to see you build a 4 PW laser alone, forget the bit about focusing it to a 1 micron target.

        • According TFA, the extreme power density was at a focal point and was not the crosssection of a collimated beam. They state they used a off-axis parabolic mirror to get the final power density. But, to Mr. Bond's %^) point, that high a power density laser beam wouldn't travel far in the atmosphere due to the plasma formation and the beam decoherence and spreading.

          I didn't see what wavelength it was operating at - was it in the article?

    • If I concentrate a toddler's strength to a needle point, he can pierce your chest and heart "like a bullet" too.

      Ya, but toddlers can't really do needle point, they don't have the dexterity.

    • Yeah umm, but how are you going to be able to do that? How do you concentrate that much power without destroying the lenses and other things in the process? How do you get a power supply that can time the release of the current at the exact time. It's not something simple that you can do without knowledge.

      • First of all, they don't use lenses. Only extremely high quality first-surface mirrors. Lenses add a lot of loss and weird optical aberrations.

        Second, TFA seems to indicate that the beam was handled generally as a 300 mm diameter beam, where they did the majority of manipulation of the wave front, with a 300 mm diameter off-axis parabolic mirror to do the final focus to a point. Order of magnitude speaking, the beam power per sq cm right up to the off-axis parabolic mirror was less by a factor of 10^7.

        Third

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If I concentrate a toddler's strength to a needle point, he can pierce your chest and heart "like a bullet" too.

      A correct statement which adds absolutely nothing of value to the discussion. Bravo.

      Yes, I am aware that my post also adds nothing of value to the discussion. The difference is that you pretend that yours does.

    • concentrate a toddler's strength to a needle point, he can pierce your chest and heart

      Clearly you've never attempted to sew leather.

    • Now all you have to do is get that toddler to release all that concentrated strength in 1E-15 seconds and you might have a point.

      Except that both those things are impossible and completely irrelevant. What the article is talking about actually is possible, and happened.

  • Time to dust off the Crossbow project... Next up, they need the "phase conjugate target tracking mirror".

  • No, photon behaves as particle with probabilities for certain properties, nothing else. Just as electron is a point particle and the notion of the probability waves being "matter waves" went out the window in the 1930s.

    • No, photon behaves as particle with probabilities for certain properties, nothing else.

      Thank you, Sir Isaac, for your input but since you were last around in the nineteenth century Young showed light could diffract which is something a particle cannot do and early twentieth-century physicists developed quantum mechanics showing it could behave as both a particle and a wave with quantized energy levels but that really it was not quite either. Today we think of it as a fundamental vector field described by quantum field theory.

      Just as electron is a point particle and the notion of the probability waves being "matter waves" went out the window in the 1930s.

      ...and yet my electron diffraction demo still works and shows elec

      • ...and yet my electron diffraction demo still works and shows electrons diffracting through a thin metal foil which is something a point particle cannot do. I guess physics doesn't tend to follow what you seem to think is fashionable.

        It's not diffracting, it's bouncing off the phlogiston which is being moved by the luminiferous æther.

        As any fule kno.

      • You have the problem. What I'm describing is the false early and mid 20th century notions. That's all long been left behind. The best model we have is QED, look it up. Point particles moving according to probability that have wavefunctions.

        You have misconception about diffraction, a point particle (and yes that's been proven long ago be experiment) has probabilities of where it lands that are altered by grating, that's all. There is no "matter wave" spread out over space, that's debunked.

        Educate yourse

        • QED is an example of a quantum field theory. It's a theory of fields spread out over all of space and time. Particles are derived concepts... They're excitations of the underlying field.

          • Yes but certain excitations (including photons as well as electrons and quarks) are POINT entities in our best models, and that assertion has experimental proof. The "wavelength" of a photon is nothing more than places with high magnitude of probability in time and space, the structureless sizeless point particle that is the photon isn't spread out nor does it occupy all that "wavelength" nor any nonzero spacial nor temporal part of that.

            • Cranky, are we?

              • No, just physics degreed. It's bad to see long discarded models still harped upon as best we have. Particle physics not the only field this occurs in, most popular descriptions of black holes also are stuck in a decades old inaccurate description.

        • The best model we have is QED, look it up. Point particles moving according to probability that have wavefunctions.

          I don't need to look it up - I've taught particle physics grad courses that include it as part of the Standard Model. QED does NOT describe photons as point particles, it describes them as quantized fluctuations of a vector field using quantum field theory. They can certainly behave as point-like particles - and they certainly do at high energies which is perhaps where your misconception is coming from - but they can also behave as waves.

          Educate yourself gramps, physics has moved on. The "matter wave" is long dead. Electrons are point particles, zero size. Proven.

          Then please explain how low energy electrons diffract when passed th

  • Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me one hundred billion dollars.

  • 10^^23 watts

    Oh. My. God.

    That's enough for 5205622071873.5845913586673607496 DeLoreans!

    • That's enough for 5205622071873.5845913586673607496 DeLoreans!

      Per square centimetre: those are going to be very, very tiny DeLoreans.

  • 1e23 watts, I figured it had to be comparable to the National Ignition Facility [wikipedia.org] but seems like it reaches a power output of a mere 500TW or 5e14. (Who am I kidding I likely butchered these numbers)

    I am sure they are not comparable in other ways, but still, that's-a spicy meatball.

    • would it be possible to point it at something and use the energy to power an engine ?

      • That's been theorized quite a bit, the application I have always heard is using lasers to power the lifting system on a space elevator, even if that's future scifi stuff. There is quite a lot of interest in lasers as "wireless" power sources though since they are not affected nearly as much by inverse square laws like RF systems are.

  • They're gonna build a Death Star...

  • Some interesting details about the project in Korean (Google does a decent job of translating it to English):

    http://www.inews24.com/view/13... [inews24.com]

    https://www.etnews.com/2021050... [etnews.com]

  • ...is can it be fitted to a shark?

  • ... that the number of watts/square cm is about the same order of magnitude as Avrogado's number?

  • The big question (Score:5, Funny)

    by qzzpjs ( 1224510 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @10:28AM (#61358904)

    Can it pop a room size bowl of popcorn kernels??

  • Needs popcorn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Black Art ( 3335 ) on Friday May 07, 2021 @10:33AM (#61358922)

    Can it fill a house with popcorn?

  • when someone steals it and mounts it on a shark.

  • Could this be used to power a projectile in such a way that it wouldnt need to carry a propellant on board?

  • Cant it pop an entire house's worth of popcorn?
  • How can there even be a cool tech story without any mention of Musk? I guess I just ftfy...

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